Daniel Jones is brought back to life

One evening late last month, the poet Kevin Connolly took the stage at Revival, a club in Toronto’s Little Italy, and proceeded to read some poems. The work was gritty, honest, and caustic. Many of those packing the venue were writers or poets themselves, so when Connolly ended his set with a short piece entitled “The Brave Never Write Poetry,” in which the speaker pleads “Someone give me the strength not to/apply to the Canada Council for the Arts. Someone/give me the strength not to write poetry” there were more than a few nervous laughs.

The funny thing is, Connolly isn’t the author of these poems. In fact, many in the crowd weren’t even alive when those words were written.

When Daniel Jones committed suicide on February 13, 1994, at the age of 33, he left behind one published collection of poetry, one published novel, and a handful of chapbooks. His legacy, however, was still being written. A book of linked stories, The People One Knows, was published shortly after his death, while his novel 1978 was posthumously published in 1998. These books, and everything else Jones wrote, eventually went out of print, and he was in danger of being forgotten by the city he chronicled.

That’s why the current resurgence of interest in his work is interesting. His seminal 1985 collection, The Brave Never Write Poetry, which he published at the tender age of 26, was just re-released by Coach House Books, while 1978 is being re-issued by Three O’Clock Press. And later this week, at a bar in Parkdale, his life and work will be celebrated by a cross-section of Toronto writers and musicians.

“It’s kind of bittersweet,” says his former girlfriend Moira Farr, author of After Daniel: A Suicide Survivor’s Tale, an excerpt of which, coincidentally, appears in the just-released Penguin Book of Memoir. “The renewal of interest in his work is great. I’m quite happy — well, I wouldn’t say happy. I don’t think it’s a happy thing when someone so talented [dies] so young, but what he left is clearly still speaking to people.”

Sarah Wayne, the publisher of Three O’Clock Press and one of those people who wasn’t alive when Jones started publishing, thinks the circumstances surrounding his death have overshadowed his writing. “I’ve always kind of felt that a lot of people took that up as the story, but I think that there’s a lot more to see in his work.”

The poems in The Brave Never Write Poetry are set in crowded bars and quiet cafes, the backseats of streetcars and unmade beds, drunk tanks and psych wards. Reading it is like stumbling over someone’s opened journal — the work is that intimate and raw. The book, says Connolly, “speaks to being young and powerless and addicted.” The collection was almost universally panned — The Globe and Mail said “Jones makes a fair bid to become the poet laureate of puking” — except by Connolly, who reviewed it in long-gone rag What!

“At the time, I just think people didn’t know what to make of it,” says Connolly, now poetry editor at Coach House. “Here’s this guy writing about throwing up and getting drunk and psycho wards as if he knew them. And, as it turns out, he did know them.”

When he was in his early 20s, Jones writes in the book’s introduction, he found himself alone, drinking too much, dirt poor, and in debt. In early 1984, he wound up “in the psycho ward of Toronto Western Hospital.” Jones wrote the majority of these peoms after he was discharged. He was sober for the rest of his life, though constantly battled depression. (“Think of the most depressed person you’ve ever met,” says Connolly. “He was about twice that.”)

Jones seems conflicted about being a poet. On one hand, he describes his work as “piles of scribblings” and sneers at the prospect of becoming a “career poet.” On the other hand, it seems to have saved him. In “A Funny Thing Happened When I Pointed A Gun To My Head” he considers blowing off his head, before deciding to write a poem instead.

“I really do think that it was art that saved him,” says Connolly. “He plays the sort of tough, Bukowski-esque, hard-drinking, world-weary poet persona, but also he has no faith in it at all. He’s constantly undermining himself, constantly undermining poetry, making fun of it — and yet it was all that he had.”

After the publication of The Brave Never Write Poetry, Jones abandoned the form and turned to fiction. In stark contrast to his emotionally-overwrought poems, Jones’ prose is sparse — so minimalist “it was almost brittle,” says Connolly. 1978 follows a cast of broken characters through the early days of Toronto’s punk scene. The reissue of 1978 is part of a surge of renewed interest in Toronto during this time: In 2009 Liz Worth published Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond; in March, Jennifer Morton published Dirty, Drunk and Punk, about D.I.Y. Toronto punk provocateurs Bunchof–kingoofs; while this month sees the release of Don Pyle’s Trouble in the Camera Club: A Photographic Narrative of Toronto’s Punk History 1976 – 1980. Jones has become one of the era’s patron saints.

Connolly isn’t sure what his friend would make of all this attention, but last month, on the night of the reading, Connolly found himself at the corner of Grace and College streets, standing in front of the apartment where Jones lived and ultimately died.

“Part of me wonders if he’d be mad at me for re-releasing the book, because he hated it so much,” wonders Connolly. “But I figured we were within 500 metres of where he lived and died, in a club called Revival, so if there was ever a better moment for an angry ghost, it would have been that, and nothing seemed to happen.

“So I think we’re OK.”

• The Brave Never Writer Poetry by Daniel Jones is published by Coach House Books, while 1978 is published by Three O’Clock Press. A tribute will take place Wednesday, May 18, at The Stop (at Parts & Labour) 1566 Queen St. W. at 7:30 p.m.